Twenty-Five Artists

Powerful -- majestic -- mysterious. To describe the
work of Calvin Albert and record its effect, does not
add to it. To trade in comparisons and place him at
the very too of his contemporaries (though pleasant
to do) reduces art to competition, to a game. It is
significant that he has found the most difficult, and
yet the most meaningful, course possible for an
artist today.

He moves with apparent ease between abstraction
and representation -- a figure leaning in the wind, a
figure reclining, each more alive than the other, each
more real. In times of great uncertainty in art (as
outside it) the safe and profitable stance is a fixed
position, anchorage upon a presumed opposite.
Abstraction or realism. Good against evil. Them versus us. But has one actually made a choice?

The young artist, rejecting the extremes and their
simplification, may decide that the good thing, the
future and success is a return to the great men of our
early century: Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Giacometti,
to walk with nimble mind and feet this dangerous
abstraction -- realism road.

But in art one cannot calculate.

You have or you don't have the vision and the
necessity, like Calvin Albert, to face the complexities, the dangers and the never satisfying rewards of
life against death.

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